Flash Fiction: The Game

I haven’t posted anything in a while. It’s not that I haven’t been writing, I’ve just been focusing on longer works and sort of neglecting the flash fiction format. This one was a quickie I wrote a few nights back. Not sure how I feel about it, but figured I’d post it anyway.

We used to play this game, she and I. We’d make plans, loosely based on movies we’d seen, and we’d talk about implementation, issues that might arise, what if’s and maybe’s and at the end of it there would be laughter and then the lights would go out and we’d play a different sort of game.

We should have made real plans, she and I. I should have built that cabin in the woods and stocked it with canned goods, just like I’d said, just like I always said. It’s how I won the game, you know. Every time, and she’d laugh because she never saw it coming, even though she should have. Because how can you trump a house in the middle of nowhere, already full of food? If you could hunt, even better. And in my scenario, I could hunt. I always won the game.

It didn’t end like we thought it would, though. That was the flaw in the game – we never could account for all the possibilities, we were so narrow minded and we were laughing and sometimes drunk and not really paying, attention, so. So we’d miss it. We always missed it.

I sit in the dark and I wait, now. I don’t have a cabin in the woods and I certainly don’t have any food stocked. I’m slowly starving to death in the unlight of my apartment, and she’s gone. Has been gone for a few days now, and I don’t know where she went. There is fire in the street and there are people crying, screaming, laughing, shouting. Everywhere. Guess that’s what happens when you have no escape. No options. This isn’t like the movies, the ones where people turn to zombies, or a plague kills of 80% of the population. In those movies the planet is always still there, after. There’s always someone around to survive, to keep pushing on. In the game, that was me. That was her.

We used to play this game, she and I. And in the end we are the only two, the last ones. And we are happy and we live by ourselves in our cabin, our cabin hidden among the trees. We have a dog because we adopted him on the way to survival, after his masters died. His name is Jasper and he loves us. In the end we eat canned green beans and deer that I’ve killed, and she grows food in her garden and we wait it out, we live simply and lovingly and we are not affected, not in the least, by the conditions of the world.

We used to play this game, she and I. I am the only one playing now, but when I close my eyes she’s there. And I am still playing, still standing with her on our cabin porch, still petting our loyal dog and kissing her, kissing her, kissing her, when everything goes dark.